The day after BRM 400

Compte rendu. Finished the BRM 400 in 23 hours sharp.....

Start at 6 am. The field, a bit over one hundred mostly-sleepy randonneurs (and a couple of randonneuses). The weather... a brief shower replaced the pistol shot. Most of the field donned water-proofs over arm & leg warmers, but I stubbornly stuck to my long-sleeved jacket (made my mind in the last minute and left my fair-weather gear at home). This time the start was from la Font dels Capellans which roughly translates as the Priests' Fountain so we had no choice but threading our way through some of the ill paved streets till we reached the road to Igualada. It's quite a scenic road that climbs the Coll de Maians amidst misty farm-land before plummeting onto Odena and nearby Igualada. By then AR and me were riding alone and all my previous navigating concerns had vanished since that man is a sort of human GPS. In fact, he's able to recall with utmost precision every turn and every gradient of any road he's riden (and I'd dare to say he's riden quite a lot!) So I mostly stuck to his wheel trying to make out I was perfectly aware of the right turn to take. At the first control we meet I.S. and J.N. -a married couple who share a keen interest in randonneuring- and J.M. a man in his sixties who's "already riden almost anything". A.R. and I were obsessed to make a time-buffer so after some cumbersome appologies we left shortly before them. Our run-away was unexpectedly brought to an end an hour or so later when we heard I.S. voice to our back saying something like "gotcha". It was rather embarrassing (and till then we'd been thinking we're making quite a time!). From then on we teamed up till Benabarre. This was our third control point and J.M. opted to pack there (I know he'd made his mind long before). Why? Well, I'm not sure and I don't know him well enough but I remember him packing in this same brevet two years ago. I'd say he's lost his mental endurance somewhere. So then our diminished pack of four faced the long-chilly-and-wet descent back into Catalonia while the sun was setting. Night fell swiftly.It was pitch dark. The expected full moon was hidden behind a cloudy sky so our vision field was limited to a narrow beam of light, bright in the center and gradually fading away in circles. Traffic thinned more and more till we had the whole road for us most of the time. With I.S. leading the pack we needed not our GPS-man. He took us through some short-cuts into Balaguer (the city of the counts of Urgell) vanishing my last navigational concern. The climb to Cubells was uneventful dissipating my doubts on my physical shape ( I remember a previous brevet when I suffered bitterly some years ago in this same spot). It was quite encouraging. We stopped in a pub in Ponts; A.R. knew the owner and he offered us a delicious supper. I took my chance to clean my face from the salty mask accumulated through the day and slept for ten minutes leaning my head on a table in the best randonneur tradition. We left Ponts by two in the morning and faced the last leg of the ride. The climb to Calaf proved challenging and got some sort of cramp that delayed me. I managed to recover somehow just to find the rest of the pack patiently waiting for me at the foot of the hill-of-hell. It's a relatively short but absolutely steep ramp at the outskirts of Calaf (a one in twenty or maybe a bit more; anyway nothing fun to tackle at in the last leg of the ride). From then on we had a really easy ride to the finish (a bit cold though... I was glad to bear my long-sleeve)